Building Package Installers – Laravel News

I think most of us that have worked with Laravel for a while are very familiar with the package installation process: add the package via composer, register the service provider, publish the config file, update the environment file, hopefully you remember to update .env.example, and after all of that you hope that you didn’t miss a step. This often involved copying and pasting from a README and bouncing back and forth between your editor and a browser. With the release of Laravel 5.5 we got a pretty great improvement to this process with package discovery but outside of that this experience hasn’t really changed much.

At the time that I had started building the Honeybadger integration for Laravel, I had almost never seen install commands for PHP packages. The only one that came to mind was Laravel Spark. When we started outlining features for the integration, Josh suggested building an installation command similar to what they have in their Ruby gem. I thought this was a really neat idea that would make the installation process much smoother.

I had some very specific goals for adding this feature

Visibility of all tasks performed (success and failures)

Avoid as much manual work as possible

Use command prompts for any required information

Compatible with Laravel and Lumen

Visibility

I really didn’t want this installer to just go off into the background, modify a bunch of your files, and just come back with a message that everything was successful. I also didn’t want the output to be super verbose.

I came across a great package by Nuno Maduronunomaduro/laravel-console-task. I really loved the simple API and the beautiful output. However, there were some issues getting this to work with Lumen so I put together a simple class to gather task names and result statuses.

Avoiding Manual Work

The whole point of using an installer is to make the installation process fast, easy, and enjoyable. I’ve found one of the biggest pain points with installing new packages is updating both the .env file AND the .env.example file.

Wrapping it up

The team at Honeybadger really strive to provide a smooth, polished, enjoyable experience from end to end which I think pairs perfectly with some of Laravel’s core principals. I think by using an installer for the package it brings that experience from their app to your terminal. We’re putting the finial touches on the installer and it will be making its way into the honeybadger-io/honeybadger-laravel library soon. You can keep an eye on the pull request here honeybadger-io/honeybadger-laravel/#11. In the interim, Honeybadger is still super easy to get up and running.